Engage More Candidates with Video-Based Social Recruiting

To say that social media has revolutionized talent acquisition is an understatement. Two years ago, according to a Jobvite survey, social recruiting had already established itself as the accepted standard among 93 percent of recruiters. A large part of that stems from the growing population of Millennials in the labor force. In fact, they represent the lion’s share of workers in the market. Their personal, professional and digital lives intersect at every juncture, unlike their predecessors. They also crave a greater sense of connection with recruiters. This attitude has undoubtedly sparked the explosive popularity of social media in hiring. Yet, tweets and texts are beginning to feel like last season’s fashions. Live video is in vogue today, and it’s dominating social engagement. If you want to reach top talent, it might be time to step in front of the camera.

Digital Interactions Can Still Be Personal

Millennials were raised as technological natives, and that means they possess skills businesses have become desperate to acquire. In today’s fiercely competitive labor market, these individuals are scooped up right away, which accounts for the volume of unfilled job openings plaguing employers. If you’re still struggling to attract active candidates, the odds are against you.

Capturing the interest of passive candidates requires piquing their attention and keeping them engaged. Because these professionals are not actively looking for work, it can be difficult to connect with them directly. However jammed they believe their calendars to be, they always seem to make time for checking in on their social networks. And that’s where you can find them and grab their attention.

We also need to begin thinking of social media as platforms beyond Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. These holy grails of sourcing are starting to lose some of their luster. More companies and recruiting professionals are realizing the value of photo sharing sites like Instagram and Pinterest as potential candidate channels — sources that better reveal the aspirations and motivations of talent. Video recruitment is fast becoming one the most effective strategies for engaging workers through the crowd. Over 75 percent of recruiters are already using video in this manner. Yet, those efforts just scratch at the surface.

A Video is Worth a Million Impressions

As social media expert Michael Stelzner revealed during Social Media Marketing World’s recent conference, 50 percent of marketers plan to rely heavily on video over the coming year. Not only that, more than 20 percent claim that video will become the most essential distribution channel for content.

Social recruiting, at its core, is a dynamic form of content marketing. And traditional approaches are fading. Analytics culled by Buzzsumo, Hootsuite and Buffer show that referral traffic for standard posts can drop dramatically over a 12-month period. Meanwhile, video shares continue to gain steam with millions of views every day.

To reach talent and make a significant impression, recruiters would be wise to follow the practices of marketers who are capitalizing on emerging trends. That means embracing the power of video to captivate the crowd. Here are four of the most useful live video tools suggested by marketing superstar Alisa Meredith. You can begin using them today to place exceptional talent in positions tomorrow.

Facebook Live. As a recruiting professional, you’ve long realized the value of Facebook to reach prospective candidates. Savvy recruiters enrich the experience by creating pages, hosting groups and posting meaningful content. With Facebook Live, you can transform those communications into robust conversations. The latest offering allows you to interact with your audience in real time. It’s not a podcast or pre-recorded webinar, it’s a genuine dialog. Here are some of the benefits.

• Your followers receive notifications when you go live. Video broadcasts also appear in your News Feed.
• Creative tools such as filters enable you to make your presentations colorful and compelling.
• Video doesn’t just provide a more personal experience for your followers, it’s proven to bring new viewers to your page.
• You can customize videos as premium content for elite members of your group, or use them to promote events you’ll be sponsoring, such as recruitment fairs.
• Your physical presence creates a heightened sense of familiarity, authority and trust with an audience. You can use the broadcasts to field questions, showcase success stories or even interview employers on what they’re looking for in top candidates.
• The video can be stored, downloaded and recycled on other media sites you own, such as YouTube.

Ready to get started? Here are some helpful tips from the folks at Facebook.

• Announce your live sessions before you launch them. This helps promote your videos and gives viewers ample time to schedule their attendance.
• Post an engaging description of your talk prior to going live.
• Ask viewers to follow you and subscribe to future notifications.
• Address audience members by name and reply to their comments.
• The longer your session (20 minutes is a suggested standard), the more opportunity you have to attract viewers.

Snapchat. When Snapchat first hit the scene, its stated goal was the emulate the mechanics of face-to-face conversations. Despite having 100 million daily active users, the service quickly earned a reputation as a digital hangout for teens who wanted to post content they probably wouldn’t share with their parents. The best part was that messages and videos automatically deleted themselves after a short span of time.

Still, with so many users and intuitive functionality, Snapchat can’t be ignored as a hot spot for social networking. And with the release of Snapchat 2.0, the platform has been repurposed with business users in mind. Snapchat 2.0 breaks down the limitations on remote communications.

Snapchat’s latest iteration “lets private conversations morph between mediums depending on what users want to show or tell,” writes Josh Constine, TechCrunch editor-at-large. “Snapchat is positioning itself as the most vivid, human way to chat.”

As HubSpot notes in a related blog post, “Every other app or device we use for communication requires a certain category or format of that communication. Phones are great for long-form audio. SMS is great for text and sometimes images. Other messenger apps are great for short form messages and transactional conversations. But before this release, no single app or device optimized for all the ways humans communicate: long form, short form, audio, video, text, photo, and drawing.” Here are some of the advantages that Snapchat 2.0 brings.

• The app enables your screen to transition seamlessly between sharing images, face-to-face interactions, video and more.
• Stories now auto-advance to maintain content flow and viewer engagement.
• Looped video and audio notes allow users to post sincere reactions rather than boilerplate messages like LOL.
• Users can now place full phone or video calls within the app, without the standard self-destruct time limits.

Even better, demographic data from Snapchat would suggest that the technically skilled talent you’re seeking have already become early adopters of the platform, which now lets you connect with them in any way they prefer.

Periscope. This video streaming social media app is well established. In the staffing industry, it garnered a lot of attention when Hootsuite used it for a massive internal recruiting campaign. Periscope explains its mission as allowing a person to see the world through another’s eyes — or video, as the case may be.

Periscope has demonstrated tremendous success in helping companies showcase their employment cultures to prospective talent around the globe. Recruiters can use similar strategies to promote clients in need of exceptional candidates. You could consider it a sort of a reverse video interview, where recruiters sell the merits of the position, the company’s vision and potential colleagues to relevant candidates. Periscope can also help your clients set the proper tone and create a stronger message that will draw the ideal talent to their doors.

Periscope goes a step further by incorporating data. The app can map onto existing social graphs, and it includes enough information to measure likes, shares, impressions, profile visits, followers and more. It also allows administrators to delve into the characteristics of engaged followers — gender, age bracket, educational level, region, interests and career goals. This information proves essential when marketing positions to candidates.

Blab. It’s what the buzz is all about, according to website. Blab is one of the latest entries to video streaming social media. Unlike the other platforms we’ve been discussing, Blab focuses entirely on collaborative video. The app lets you host a live video conference with up to four people speaking simultaneously. That doesn’t mean audience membership is limited. Anyone who wishes to view the session may log on and send messages via tweets or direct chats, which appear in opposite panes around the video. What also differentiates Blab from Periscope is that it works on PCs — not just mobile devices. Some of the other benefits of Blab follow.

• Moderators can record their sessions and upload them on YouTube, iTunes, podcasts and any other service.
• Videos can be triggered on demand or scheduled in advance.
• If fewer than three other people are participating, an “empty seat” appears.
• Any person in the audience can request the moderator’s approval to enter.
• Blab allows viewers to rate each participant with a system similar to “likes.”
• This data is valuable to recruiters who want to hone their discussion topics to reach specific types of talent.
• Blab allows you to log on using your Twitter account.
• Blab facilitates unique types of interactions, not just talking to candidates. It’s like a video podcast where you can interview people, promote a specific agenda and really sell your recruitment brand to prospects.

Join the Next Social Recruiting Evolution

The deep interest in video-based social media is a strong indication that today’s talent want real relationships with their recruiters. They seek the personalization that phone conversations and physical meetings offer, yet with the simplicity and immediacy of digital media. They are the early adopters of the next social media evolution. And recruiters who are looking for an edge over their competition will prosper by taking part.